Is The Elect a mere collection of "straw man" notions?

Addressing a classic strategy: bias cloaked as analysis

I won’t be able to engage each and every objection to The Elect, of course. However, some of them will cluster around a general theme: people of Elect persuasion or leanings who insist that the problem I have identified does not actually exist.

I’m not sure anyone could read the whole book and come away with that claim in a form that most could take seriously. The Elect is not mere hand-wringing about a few isolated but highly publicized episodes. It covers a mood and ideology of nationwide impact, that even any unbiased cultural historian would see as key to our moment (I openly admit I am biased!).

Almost no one has seen the whole book, though – I get that. In any case, I sense already that a common claim will be more specific, focusing on the ten-point list of self-contradictory tenets on race in the first segment I have posted. The idea will be that these tenets are “straw man” argumentation, that no one has actually said or written such things, and/or that I am “oversimplifying” matters.

The “oversimplifying” claim requires especial attention, because the people who make it are implying that to truly grapple with these issues requires endless hemming and hawing and drawing lines down the middle – to the point that nothing can be said or even felt at all. Which may be intellectually valid on a certain level, but the nut is this: quite a few of the same people listen to and read Elect writers with nary an objection. There, suddenly they understand that to engage substantial issues requires a degree of abstraction and generalization, and mysteriously lose their insistence that all characterizations of general orientations and moods require hundreds of direct quotations to be valid.

So, for example, to them Nikole Hannah-Jones’ claims about American history are “a useful conversation starter” regardless of certain undeniable infelicities regarding accuracy and fact. But a book like The Elect is merely ridiculous because it depicts and summarizes general positions rather than -- well, I wonder what I’m supposed to do? Trawl the internet for direct quotations from dozens of figures on talk shows and transcribe their utterances? But remember, to quote just two or three people would qualify as mere “anecdote,” with those people as “extremes” that don’t represent anything general. To score I’d have to quote a good fifty people for each point – which would make the book unreadable. This requirement – even if tacit – is equivalent to wishing I would say nothing. (Which I’m sure many of these people do! But you take my point.)

I can tell that some people think The Elect is a whole book about only those ten tenets, because of the architecture of the Persuasion edited version of the first chapter. It is a superb edit (thank you, Tom Rachman), but it is, necessarily, an abridgement. The catechism, while I stand behind it, is not the basis of the book, which explores the phenomenon much more widely. In the book itself, that catechism comes later in the text flow, for example.

Anyway, here is my main response to the straw man bit. If on hearing a black person making one of the (a) affirmations in the catechism you would nod, and then upon hearing another black person making the corresponding (b) affirmation you would nod as well, then my point stands.

If your guiding idea is that no matter what a black person – or at least the proper kind of black person (i.e. not a “contrarian” one like me) – says, your job is to not question, then my point stands. It stands because if that is your guiding commitment, then you are willing to maintain it even when two points contradict one another.

Many will still insist that I am oversimplifying, etc. – but I’m not sure they are fully executing the thought experiment I have proposed.

A black person on NPR says “To ensure a representative number of black students and foster a diversity of views in classrooms, we must adjust what we mean by standards regarding grades and test scores.” You nod.

A few weeks later you attend a panel discussion where one of the people on stage is a black woman who says “Assuming a black student was admitted to a school via racial preferences is racist, and it’s also racist to expect them to represent the ‘diverse’ perspective (she illustrates this with indignant air quotes) in the classroom.” The audience cheers this. If you nod and cheer along with them, despite having nodded at what you heard on the radio a few weeks ago, you are precisely embodying my catechism.

It doesn’t matter that upon examination you are inclined to say that the issue is “complex.” The question is: just when you were intending to resolve that complexity or, if I may, to ever even address it? Let’s face it – this would be a distinctly awkward kind of “complexity” that would risk touching a third rail that could get you called racist.

So instead, you harbor the contradictory observations together, giving assent to whichever one you hear when appropriate. This is what I meant by the catechism.

And I can’t help saying: if anyone thinks that the positions in the catechism are mere “straw man” concoctions, they don’t follow race issues very closely. Those are very real and long-lived positions asserted by legions all the time, and countless readers will attest to it, including ones you can see in the comments here to my posts. I am not making things up. I am shining a light on real things that simply make no sense.

Some people might ask themselves whether they really hold the writers they approve of to the standards they prop up for writers who question the hyper-woke orthodoxy. In the work of countless Elect favorites -- whose names and work I shall not mention, as my point here is not score-settling with them – there are observations galore which are, technically, “oversimplified” and necessarily so, because to never generalize at all is to refrain from reasoning and synthesis.

Too often, the objection “That’s oversimplified” is a symptom not of analysis, but bias.